I installed the electronics last night and gave it a whirl. It sounds pretty good, but I’m still waiting for the ceramic magnets to come in before I call it a wrap.

The li’l Lady sent me this pic this morning. She likes to put my guitars on this shelf for some reason.

I still have some more work to do on it. I have a rogue fret up by the 12th fret, and I need to get some new strings and do a proper set up. I might bring it to rehearsal tonight just for kicks.

Overall, I’d say it was a success. Most of the fellas didn’t know at first that I had actually made the whole thing myself and had assumed it was a new bass. I got compliments on the colors, while our drummer said he loved the Jetsons look.

It plays and handles really nicely and for a semi-hollow it feels really stable and solid. It’s about the right weight and is well balanced. I still have to address the fret noise, but it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t play around it. I’ll take a look at that over the weekend. It may be as simple as adding some more relief to the neck.

Now, granted are these two things: the bass amp at rehearsal is this old 100w Yamaha 115 combo that basically sounds like crumpled paper and the neodymium pickup is a placeholder. That being said, I got a lot of compliments on the tone. The neodymium version of this pickup sounds kind of plain and nondescript to me, but where it excels is in playing dynamics. It really responds really to touch, and I really liked that I didn’t have to really pull on the strings to get a lot of tone out of it. However, the amp wasn’t really able to render those dynamics as well as my Markbass.

The one-knob preamp is a cool feature. When it’s turned all the way to “treble” the bass is cut way down and the highs are boosted. Turned to bass, the treble is cut and the bass is boosted. I had it somewhere in the middle, give or take a few clicks. While it’s not a very sophisticated preamp, it gives you a really quick way to dial in your tone. The pickup and electronics are dead silent when you are not playing.

We had a great rehearsal, and without getting into specifics, there a few pretty good jokes passed around about me being the white guy from Oakland. Our drummer went as far as saying he wants to commission one of my basses for his studio, but he was probably just being nice.

I went home that night and A/B’d it with the ceramic pickup in the test bass. The step boy was there and he plays guitar in a local band as well. We both agreed that while the neodymium version sounds good, the ceramic version is better. The ceramics bring a faster low end response and the ceramic version is generally fatter, warmer and punchier sounding. The neo is much brighter without sounding harsh, but that’s not to say the ceramic is not bright. Using a set of well-broken flatwounds, the ceramic pickup is definitely bright sounding. Brightness and bassiness aside, what really sets it apart is its well-defined upper-midrange. I think that while the neodymium version puts out wider more even tone, that is ultimately its undoing – it has no emphasis on anything in particular.

The good news is, I think my ceramic magnets will be here soon. I just got a shipping invoice from Magnetic Hold this morning.

Every day I inch a little closer… Picked my poles up from the fabricator today. Set me back about $6 and some change each. Not bad. I’ll have to start running some tests with these once I get that guitar body off my desk. #funktronicpickups #basspickups #bassplayer #madscientist #madeinfillmore #handwoundpickups #hechoenfillmore

I bolted the pickup into the body the other night and I’ve been rocking out on it for a few days now.

With the StingRay pre I have, it can go from really deep to really bright and has midrange to spare. I’ve dialed a little bit of the mids back on my amp and I got it sounding pretty good. I may look into building up a 3-band version of the preamp just to have some more control on-board. This pickup puts out a fair amount of information, so I’m feeling like the 2-band is a little limiting.

This pickup has a lot of kick! It’s pretty sensitive and seems to pick up pretty much everything that comes out of my fingers. If I play softly, it sounds soft. If I hit it hard it hits. Overall, the attack and responsiveness I think I can attribute to the neos. Did I say it has a lot of kick?

On a side note, I tried wiring it in both series and parallel – interestingly enough, they sounded pretty much the same, just the series version was quieter. It didn’t get that scoopy sound I usually hear from a parallel HB. I think that may be because a majority of the action is coming from that center bar.

At some point down the line, I may try a few other versions of this pickup, specifically:

Same gauge wire with a lower wind count

1 or 2 larger wire gauges wound to match the size of the current coil

I’m really happy with this pickup. I’ll be posting a quick iPhone clip in the near future. In the meantime, I’m going to start thinking about some other aspects of this project.

Anyway, all the parts are made, except I have to actually get the mounting hardware to work. I polished the steel blades by hand, which was long and tiresome.

The dog ears came out pretty good. The surfaces need a little work, but for now, I’m going to leave it. Most of them will be inside the body of the guitar. Eventually, I’m going to have to make a new mold. Ill worry about it then.

However, I wanted to point out a cool detail with the dog ears:

I cut these little channels in the original so that they’d lock into this little joint on the coils…

OK, so the next thing I gotta do is figure out how to glue the danged thing together! That is going to be a really cool trick once I figure it out!

On a side note, I decided I’m going to sell my wide format inkjet printer to my work and use some of the dough to buy something like this:

It seems like there’s a lot of them around for about $100 – $150. There’s about 3-4 time a week I find myself thinking, “It sure would be a lot easier to do this with a sheet metal shear instead of using a hacksaw and file to clean the edge.”